By James Cannon | Jacksonville Business Journal | View the original article.
Jacksonville Business Journal Editor James Cannon recently spoke with ETM President Tyler Mathews, for a segment of the Florida Business Minds podcast.
Sponsored by TECO Peoples Gas, the audio series features candid conversations with top business leaders from the Orlando, South Florida, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville regions.
With a variety of projects in the works and clients requesting support across the state, ETM’s leader, Tyler Mathews, is planting teams in Tampa Bay and Orlando. In this episode, JBJ Editor-in-Chief James Cannon invites Mathews to share ETM’s success story, and how he plans to duplicate that level of service in development consulting and public works in multiple markets.
Find more Florida Business Minds podcasts here.
The following is a brief excerpt from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
You have a saying, ‘work where you live’ as part of your company philosophy. Can you talk a little bit why that’s important to you and how you kind of live that at ETM?
I think it goes back to our tagline of “Trusted Advisors, Creating Community.” And we say we want to be a trusted advisor. And so that’s aspirational of I don’t want to just be a vendor. I want to be an advisor, much like how you think of your closest lawyer or your closest doctor, like they’re an advisor to you when you’re going through hard things, much how we see ourselves. But then the second component creating community, and that is what we believe, is our why.
I know you’ve recently expanded into the Orlando market. What’s that been like so far?
… and we’re also in the process of expanding into Tampa today. For so long have had clients tell us, ‘we love working with you. We love the way you think … what ETM delivers is different than than what other firms like you deliver. And so we want to take you with us.’ And so for so long, we actually would tell people no, because in our business, you’ve got to have some physical presence. You can’t just parachute in from anywhere in America, because you’ve got to have local relationships. And so for so long, we just said no client. ‘Thank you for the kind words, but I can’t serve you like I want to serve you in Orlando, so we’re just not even going to try.’ Effectively, our pivot in 2020 was, let’s just start saying no less … to the spirit of when we have a real opportunity and real clients or real hiring that presents itself in Orlando and then now in Tampa, Let’s just methodically start saying yes, and let’s not promise more than we can deliver, but let’s methodically, one great hire at a time and one great project at a time, methodically build a business. Today, we have over 50 people in Orlando and so, so you just look at it, and you say, you know, one by one, one great hire, one great project at a time, you can start honoring that commitment of we really want to be a client’s competitive advantage, and now we can do that in Orlando five years ago, we couldn’t.
Tune into the Florida Business Minds podcast episode above for the full interview, where we talk about how ETM is expanding throughout the state. For more Florida Business Minds episodes, click here.
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